When did they learn to do this!
The study, published Tuesday in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, tracked 52 female polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea off Alaska. Between 2004 and 2009, a period of extreme summer-ice retreat, about a third of those bears made swims exceeding 48 kilometres in distance, according to the study results.
The 50 recorded ultra-marathon swims averaged 155 kilometres, and one bear was able to swim nearly 354 kilometres, according to the study results. The duration of the long-distance swims lasted from most of a day to nearly 10 days.
I blame the overcrowding.
h/t Mike
In open ocean water.
Gee.
I have long suspected, or more than suspected, that field biologists usually are not mental giants. Did they ask any Inuit? By the way, polar bears can run fast on land and can travel long distances. In fact probably the only reason we don't see more of them in lower latitudes is that they really like eating seal (yes, Greenpeace, polar bears like killing and eating seal, and are good at it - check out Youtube videos on the subject).
The Blubb says, "the debate about climate change ...", but science has little to do with debate; least of all debate that a ******** newspaper reporter could follow.
"numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt."
Put a naked ecotard in a cage with a hungry Polar Bear in midwinter at the North Pole, at the same time put a naked ecotard in a cage with a hungry Polar Bear on a beach in California. Compare temperature effects on the bears ability to feed itself.
That's it!!! We gotta swap the polar bears who drink Coke with the pengies in Antartica.After all,pengies live in New Zealand,a fact eco-cultist tards seem to forget,or fail to resarch.Surely the penguins could survive a whole 0.5C increase in temp up in the Arctic!
Oh and BL@KBIRD....please make sure that Suziki(or how however you spell the scums name) is in one of those cages.
" ... I have long suspected, or more than suspected, that field biologists usually are not mental giants. ... Posted by: John Lewis at May 2, 2012 1:18 PM ..."
Agreed in full. The MNR (Ontario) routinely trapped problem bears in the Parry Sound area and dumped them in the Bruce Peninsula (Tobermory ) area ... not humane to shoot them you see.
Anyway , it seems one problem bear managed to get back several times . It is roughly 40NM across Georgian Bay , and it either swam or walked all the way around. I suspect it swam , because walking would have encountered more humans with guns ... but as you noted the geniuses at MNR had no clue how it got back.
But algore said they were drowning!
The first clue is that polar bears are called Ursus Maritimus, literally 'bear of the seas'. You'd think the sciency types would know that and wonder how they got the name.
Actually, the blue penguin can also be found in Australia on the south coast which is 34 degrees South, about the same distance as the Meditteranean from the equator.
John Lewis >
"did they ask Inuit"
" Ask the little Affermative Action brown people that we keep on welfare ghettos something that we can learn in a Socialist University with millions in grants? Are you daft, I have to pay for my student loans somehow you know" - BA major in polar bear fecal.
Nunavut allows 450 to be shot. As many as 1,000 are killed each year if you include Alaska etc.
As Ace would say, bullets and global warming kill a lot of Polar Bears ... but it was mostly the bullets.
My comment at the Globe:
In view of the two Climategate scandals resulting in the sacking and fraud trial of Dr. Phil Jones and his subsequent admission of no warming in 15 years; the revelation the Rajendra Pachauri being heavily invested in both cap-and-trade and oil recovery; the revelation of the "hockey stick" graph being based on teh results of dendrochronology data from one tree in Russia, graph creator Michael Mann's constant lying and skewing of stats and the Russian climatologists' declaration that the CRU fudged Russian stats; the melting/sublimation of the MARTIAN polar caps; and on and on and on and ON ad nauseam - anyone still found to be using the term "climate change deniers" needs to be recognized and called out as a complete and utter idiot.
Bad day for the Warmongers. Bears can really swim and someone found a box full of old maps showing Arctic Ice extent for the early part of the last century.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/02/cache-of-historical-arctic-sea-ice-maps-discovered/
Seems the Arctic ice extent has a regular ebb & flow.
Polar bears are able to swim long distances while fish can't walk on land. Maybe the polar bears just don't realize how us humans have defined them.
One bear wearing a full body cover-up asked all the other bears to get out of the water, citing the modesty requirements of its medieval religious beliefs.
I'd like to see some of these geniuses do research to determine how long a seal lives after he's clubbed over the head,versus being dragged to an ice floe and eaten alive by a polar bear.
Polar bears can swim long distances.Wow. All large wild animals can swim long distances. I've seen black bears on islands ten miles from shore,as well as moose and deer. They didn't get there by boat.
I've seen bears swimming across wide lakes and rivers,they are very strong swimmers,and they aren't particularly adapted to that role.
I always figured polar bears would be able to swim long distances,it's part of living where they do. Over the thousands of years of development of the species,it'd be surprising if Mother Gaia didn't include that ability.
"Studies" show all kinds of amazing things,but the most amazing thing is that so many "studies" conflict with other "studies",yet they still get funding from taxpayers to continue studying.
They have webbed feet for a reason.
This isn't really a surprise. I remember reading an excerpt from a whaling ship's log some time in the 1700's stating that they had killed a number of white bears transitting between North America and Greenland--and this was in Canadian Geographic about 20 yrs ago on an article about Polar Bears. I guess these researchers don't really do much researching.
The over crowding theory might not be as far off as you think.
Put a naked ecotard in a cage with a hungry Polar Bear in midwinter at the North Pole, at the same time put a naked ecotard in a cage with a hungry Polar Bear on a beach in California. Compare temperature effects on the bears ability to feed itself.
Posted by: BL@KBIRD at May 2, 2012 1:27 PM
Both bears would be fed but likely lose some intellignece in the process. It also sounds like terrible abuse of a clueless animal...and not very nice to the bears either.
I'm waiting for polar bears todiscover they can swim up the St. Lawrence.
Then one Sunday afternoon, they meet the NDP caucus paddling in a convoy of canoes.
Dr. David Suzuki would, of course, be leading the convoy, while explaining Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest.
Gotta love the hedging at the end of the article.
Oh, but global warming is still threatening the bears . . . sometime in the future . . . I think. (Psst, does the grant money keep coming?)
Soon the trials should start, if the occupy homeless clueless ever realize their handouts of billions were aggregated into the bank accounts of Suzuki Gore Pauchari etc, they might just protest over at their mansions "not". Fellow travellers in the never ending SCAM of globall warming, never turn on one another do they? Favill, Polar bears have been swimming eating and drinking coke for millions of years, and when the penguin numbers are lower, that's when they swim to" Green"land for cash for more penguins I'll bet. Sarc off.
They have to be able to swim great distances. How else would they be able to travel those long distances to be able to thank the consumers who purchased those effin little sparky cars.
How many creatures have been displaced, wounded or killed by so-called "green" activists, machines or actions?
Observation is beneath these eco-twits as evidence destroys the narrative.
Will these fact about the swimming ability of polar bears ever make it into a scientific discussion in the classrooms our our indoctrination institutions?
I call bull. They didn't learn this recently.It has been known for years that polar bears are able to swim long distances as their hollow hair makes them very buoyant. Russian sailors told me in Churchill Manitoba in the 80's that they saw polar bears 50 miles from the nearest land or ice when the ships were heading to Churchill to pick up grain in August.
The ship they were on was the first one into port that year and had to break miles of thick ice to reach the port.
That was the year Greenpeace said we had killed the Beluga whales because none had shown up in Churchill at their usual time. We saw thousands of Beluga whales in the bay[told more than normal].
The sailors said the whales followed them into the bay like dolphins in the open ice behind the ship. The reason the whales were late was the heavy ice pack that year.
"Sorry, did we say polar bears? We meant penguins."
"Penguins? There are no penguins in the arctic."
"You SEE?!!"
Remember never to mention that the bears easily survived the Holocene Temperature Optimum, which was far warmer than now in the arctic, and for more than a thousand years. It was only 8,000 years ago.
Please God let there be an Occupy Churchill.
BL@KBIRD, I'm disappointed in you. Have you learned nothing from the antics of the CRU? Your experiment proves nothing - we can't possibly conclude anything from your experiment without replicating it.
Repeatedly.
Like, a lot.
Fat floats to the top, just ask Yo Momma! They skim along right smoothly.
Polar bear fur has the unique characteristic of being tiny, hollow tubes. This allows for better insulation during the coldest winter months and when swimming in near freezing water. It has also been credited with giving these massive animals more buoyancy when swimming across large expanses of water.
Do any of these 'professional experts' even read their own research? Or is it just more convenient to forget when it suits them?
Something that the bear huggers never seem to consider. Do we really want a large population of giant apex predators? Grizzlies and black bears are bad enough without polar bears roaming around too.
" Scientists do not know whether such long-distance swimming is a new behaviour, USGS officials said."
I'm not a polar bear expert, but all my research shows that they have been training for these swims since about the time the movie " An Inconvenient Truth" was released.
I stopped drinking Coke when the polar bears started drinking it and the advertisers took up drinking Kool-aid.
"Do we really want a large population of giant apex predators? Grizzlies and black bears are bad enough without polar bears roaming around too." NO we don't want them. In Newfoundland we do get the occasional polar bear, come down on the ice (as this spring). They are very aggressive and fear little. My friend Doug P worked on a shrimper off Greenland for a couple of Januaries and they often encountered polar bears, which would growl and snarl at them and not show any inclination to get out of the way. Polar bears are NOT black bears nor grizzlies. They are far more dangerous.
There are several youtube videos showing polar bears hunting and killing seals. Here is one of them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxVMnJXWvdM
This one shows closeups of a polar bear eating a seal:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z4FNUwN0gs
@ Ghost of Ed, ditto here.
Sure they can swim for miles,and run like the wind, but until they master the bicycle,they will never win a triathlon. Coke,or no coke.